Samsung Flaunts Software at Galaxy S4 Launch

The Samsung Galaxy S4 (above), which was announced last night at a big event at Radio City Music Hall, is an impressive piece of hardware. It has a 5-inch, 1,920-by-1,080 display; a quad-core processor; a 13 megapixel camera; and fast LTE support. As such, it's a big step up over last year's phones, including Samsung's former flagship, the Galaxy S III. Even so, it's not all that different from the other high-end Android phones we saw announced in the weeks leading up to Mobile World Congress.

The Samsung Galaxy S4 (above), which was announced last night at a big event at Radio City Music Hall, is an impressive piece of hardware. It has a 5-inch, 1,920-by-1,080 display; a quad-core processor; a 13 megapixel camera; and fast LTE support. As such, it's a big step up over last year's phones, including Samsung's former flagship, the Galaxy S III. Even so, it's not all that different from the other high-end Android phones we saw announced in the weeks leading up to Mobile World Congress.

But confirming my belief that software is rapidly becoming the most important distinction among smartphones, Samsung sped through a list of hardware features at the announcement and devoted most of the evening to showing off the new software features. These included the ability to insert yourself into a picture you are taking and improved "hands-free" methods of controlling the phone. It's quite a long list of features, and my guess is there are a few that will get a lot of use, but many that most users will ignore.

JK Shin (above), president of the mobile communications division of Samsung, started the event, which was simulcast in Times Square, by explaining that Samsung's goal with the S4 is to "help us lead a richer, simpler, and more full life." He went on to list a number of the new software features of the phone, including "dual camera" picture-in picture; smart scrolling and pausing based on eye-tracking; the "touchless interface"; a translator application; Group Play for playing a song on multiple devices; and a new S Health feature, which builds in health monitoring capabilities. All of these together, he said, show off Samsung's commitment to "innovation to improve the way people truly live every day." I'm not sure I'd use most of the features quite every day, but they do look good.

These features were later expanded upon by Ryan Bidan, director of product marketing for Samsung Telecommunications America. Along with master of ceremonies Will Chase, Bidan used a series of somewhat hokey Broadway-style skits to show off the new features, again emphasizing the software. The new features are intriguing, but I'm not sure there's one that stands out enough to differentiate the S4 inform other high-end phones in the market.

Hardware Basics

As widely expected, the Galaxy S4 has a 5-inch, 1,920-by-1,080 display. While that's bigger, Shin said the Galaxy S4 is "slimmer, lighter, and more solid" than the previous flagship Galaxy S III. The S4 measures 136.6-by-69.8–by-7.9 mm, which makes it almost identical in height and width, but a bit slimmer (the S III was 8.6 mm thick); and weighs 130g (versus 133g for the S III). The larger screen fits into the same space in part because of thinner bezels, so the S4 looks a bit more modern. The S4 also has a removable 2,600mAh battery instead of the 2,100mAh battery in the S III, but the full unit is still slightly lighter.

I thought the Galaxy S III was quite nice, but was a bit concerned about the plastic feel; the S4 sports a new polycarbonate case, but it really doesn't feel very different. It will be available in black and white.

Samsung is using the company's Super AMOLED display, as opposed to the LCD displays in most of the competing phones. AMOLED is very bright, with lots of contrast, and the models on display looked very vibrant. Some display purists may well think it is oversaturated, compared with the best LCD displays, but it certainly looks good. It wasn't clear, but it seems likely that this uses a version of the firm's PenTile display technology (which has fewer subpixels), but given the high density of the display (441ppi), I doubt normal users will care.

The screen is now touted as "glove friendly," which will be very useful on cold mornings. The sensor now lets you perform basic navigation by hovering your fingers just above the screen rather than actually touching it, using a feature called "Air Gesture."

Shin said the S4 will be available from 327 mobile operators in 155 countries, starting in the end of April. It will support "all" of the various 3G and 4G LTE standards, including FD and TD-LTE. It will also run on Category 3 LTE, promising up to 100Mbps download and 50Mbps upload; that doesn't quite match the Huawei Ascend P2 announced at Mobile World Congress, which supports LTE Category 4 (theoretically allowing downloads up to 150Mbps), but the S4 will be out sooner and very few networks today support those speeds.

It has a 13-megapixel, rear-facing camera, along with a 2–megapixel, front-facing one. Although the camera features sound good, this is actually fairly standard hardware, without any of the camera changes that Nokia and HTC have promised lately.

Other hardware features include 2GB RAM, and 16GB of flash built-in (with 32 and 64GB options) plus a microSD slot that can take up to an additional 64GB. It has a wide variety of sensors including an accelerometer, compass, gyroscope, GPS< RGB light, IR gestures, barometer, thermometer, and humidity. (The company didn't show off any weather related apps, but the hardware's all there.)

Interestingly, the company listed all the major specs but one: the applications processor. In press briefings, Samsung said it will use either a 1.9GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 Pro or a Samsung Exynos 5 Octa, depending on market. The units on display appear to have the Exynos processor, but it wasn't clear. However, it's likely the US market will get the Qualcomm processor, as it offers support for the LTE networks used here. If this is true, it's interesting that the company chose a fast version of the S4 Pro, rather than the new Snapdragon 600 which phones like the HTC One and LG Optimus G Pro will have.

Software Features

To me, the hardware seems great—way better than last year's—but since the phone doesn't look much different, it will be software that sets it apart. The phone runs the latest version of Android 4.2 "Jelly Bean" but Samsung never actually said that during the event, choosing to focus on its own applications. Even Samsung's Android UI enhancements, which have been called "TouchWiz," weren't called out by name, though it does seem to have some changes for the S4, mostly simplifications rather than the "Liquid" theme the S III had.

While it may run Android, Samsung focused more on its unique applications. The home screen of the phone has a Google Play icon, but it also has another icon for "Samsung Apps," essentially the company's own store. (You'll still need Google Play for the broader selection of apps.) More importantly, company seems to be pushing the idea of its own "Samsung Hub" (above), which lets you purchase music, video, games, and books. Samsung clearly wants to build its own ecosystem apart from Google's. The Hub looks good, but I'm not sure that any of the Android phone makers offer a compelling reason to use their store over another.

In the run-up to the announcement, there was a lot of hype about "eye-tracking" features, but the final product just has a few minor nods in that direction. When the correct options are set, you can pause video by looking away from the screen, and scroll up and down on a page by tilting the phone slightly while you are looking at it. These seem nice, but not nearly as exciting as you would have thought from all the coverage. My guess is they won't get a lot of use.

Similarly, there are more hands-free features. In particular, the S Voice feature, essentially Samsung's answer to Siri, has added more new features. It now includes a version called S Voice Drive, designed to come on when you are driving the car, with a customized, simpler version of the interface with larger fonts. This should make things like navigation and answering and responding to calls or emails easier during hands-free operation. I rarely commute by car, so my big use would be for navigation, where this doesn't look a whole lot different than previous versions. I tend to think that email and even voice can wait until I'm not driving.

The enhanced camera features surely will get used, though. Every major smartphone maker seems to be intent on adding new camera features, typically through software, and Samsung is no exception. The new idea here is "dual camera," which means it takes a picture of the photographer through the front-facing camera, while taking the main picture through the rear camera. This displays the photograph in the finished picture in a window that can look like a postage stamp (shown above) or one of several other designs. It's really easy to do and works with both still pictures and video. Sure, it sounds a little silly, but I can imagine it actually getting a fair amount of use. After all, whenever a group takes a photo, the photographer is left out.

Other camera features include "sound and shot," which lets you add sound before or after taking a still picture; a "drama shot," which lets you take up to 100 shots in four seconds and combine shots to be shown in one picture to show off motion; and an "eraser" to let you remove extraneous people in the background of a shot. It also has a Story Album feature, which can automatically combine photos taken on the same date into an album and then let the album be printed as a book through Blurb.

Within the picture gallery, a feature called "Airview" lets you hover over the screen to see larger previews of pictures. That seems to work quite well.

Perhaps the most useful feature for travelers will be S Translator (above), which instantly translates your speech or text into another language. For instance, in the example they used, you could type in English and have the phone speak in Chinese, then hear the result in Chinese, and give the answer in English. There are a number of other translating programs out there—Google Translate is fairly common on Android—but this looks good. I tried it out afterwards, and it seems to do a good job with typed Spanish, but the launch event was too loud for the voice features to work. It will support nine languages: English, Chinese, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Brazilian, Portuguese, and Spanish.

For IT departments, the S4 will be the first phone to support Samsung Knox, the software announced at Mobile World Congress that effectively splits your phone into two environments: one for work and one for personal applications. This provides security for an IT department and privacy for the end user. There are a number of phones or software projects with this project coming out, notably BlackBerry Balance, and I wrote about a number of these recently. Still, it's good to see the first Samsung phone aimed at this market, and I do expect companies will like the idea, although I wonder whether firms will really want to standardize on a single company's phones rather than a BYOD policy.

It also has a feature called "S Health," which uses the sensors in the device to measure things like steps walked and stairs climbed. It does many of the same thing as devices from companies like FitBit and Body Media. It's more convenient not having to carry a separate device, but not really a new idea. Samsung said there will be options including a scale, an arm band for measuring more data, and options for measuring blood sugar and blood pressure options.

Many of the other features seem a bit gimmicky to me. Group Play lets you share music and play it simultaneously on as many as eight Galaxy devices, so you can get two- or even five-channel sound. Since the sound system doesn't seem like anything special, you might be better off just getting a good speaker system. ChatOn, Samsung's special video client, now allows video calling with up to five people but since most people want to talk to people who use more general video clients (like Skype), I'm not sure how popular that will be. Still, it looks like a good competitor to Apple's FaceTime.

Other features include Homesync, a "personal cloud" device with 1TB of storage designed to sync and store your photos, similar to products that Seagate and Western Digital have had for some time; and a new program that makes it easier to back up the contents of your old phone to a PC and transfer it to a new device.

Overall, there is a lot of software; it's like Samsung wanted to try a little bit of everything. I'm sure the camera features will get a lot of use and there are customers who certainly want additional security and health monitoring, but I'm not sure how many people will actually use the other add-ons. No one feature made me say, "Wow, I need this phone," but it's an impressive total package. Still, it looks like one of the strongest, most capable smartphones yet, and it should be more than enough to keep Samsung users very happy. I look forward to trying one out.

Michael J. Miller's Forward Thinking Blog: forwardthinking.pcmag.com
Michael J. Miller is chief information officer at Ziff Brothers Investments, a private investment firm. From 1991 to 2005, Miller was editor-in-chief of PC Magazine, responsible for the editorial direction, quality and presentation of the world's largest computer publication.
Until late 2006, Miller was the Chief Content Officer for Ziff Davis Media, responsible for overseeing the editorial positions of Ziff Davis's magazines, websites, and events. As Editorial Director for Ziff Davis Publishing since 1997, Miller took an active role in...
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